[23 Oct 2017] These are my own observations per project from the short list. I will only mention negative things, since all projects are pretty good, no need to say how good they are. I listed problems in order of importance (most critical on top).

My overall impression this year is that I’m getting much less garbage. There are fewer projects submitted, but the quality of them is much higher than in the previous two years. I’m glad to see this tendency. It means to me that I’m doing the right thing.

This time I paid more attention to the elegance of OOP and maintainability of the code base. Key factors for the maintainability were:

Automated releases

Automated static analysis

Automated builds (CI)

Automated tests

Disciplined commits, via issues and PRs

For the elegance of OOP, as usual, I paid attention to the absence of anti-patterns, including NULL, getters, setters, static, mutability, etc.

There are two winners this year: php-ai/php-ml and mafagafogigante/dungeon. But I don’t really like the code I found in these repositories. It’s obviously better than everybody else, but not perfect at all.

That’s why, here is my decision: I will give just $1,024 to each winner, instead of $2,048.